Online advertising has become a substantial revenue driver for many companies that offer products and/or services through the internet. Advertising not only generates revenue for the host companies but also serves as a critical tool for companies and businesses to promote products and services. For example, companies with high-traffic websites (the host companies) can charge a premium for advertising (“ad”) space on their websites. Advertisers can invest in the available advertising space and post customized content to purchased advertising space. Advantageously, the host companies can generate revenue by selling ad space on their websites, and the advertisers can immediately publish information or customized content to a desired audience.
Third party companies (also referred to as vendors) offer both advertising and analytical solutions for host companies to facilitate, for example, ad placement and ad reporting. Advertising solutions (e.g., advertising vendors) serve video content and display the actual ads for an advertiser. Analytics tools can provide the business intelligence to, for example, inform on product development decisions and aid in the assessment of available ad inventory. For example, rating services for ad space can impact ad revenue (e.g., such services can impact the Cost Per Mille (CPMs) that a host company can charge for digital advertising). The proper functioning of these third party applications can have a direct impact on profitability.
Unfortunately, many of these third party applications require configuration, regular maintenance, and/or technical integration with a host company's website. These requirements (which are often brand specific) can be further compounded by software enhancements, updates, and bug fixes made to both the third party applications and how host companies integrate with the third party applications. All of these software configuration changes and underlying code changes need to be deployed throughout an entire host company's network. For example, if a host company operates ten different websites (e.g., each website is associated with a unique brand) then the host company needs to implement any software configuration changes and code changes ten separate times (once for each of the ten website). Such distributed implementations are often extremely inefficient to implement and maintain.